Friday, December 18, 2009

Have We Ever Had A Piece Of A Flying Disk?

People have claimed a fair number of "artifacts" or debris from UFOs but rarely is there anything that remotely checks out as of any interest at all. For me, two, of a very small number of such possibilities, are metals from the Foster ranch [Roswell] debris field and the Brazilian Ubatuba magnesium fragment. This post will say a little something about each of them.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Many UFO-interested people will assume that, with the exception of first hand "holders" of the debris [like Major Marcel], there are no pieces of scientific interest on this Roswellian subject at all. They could be correct, but they could also be mistaken. I want to explain that a bit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roswell doubters usually lead off with comments like "if we really had a crashed alien spacecraft, everybody'd know it. Our government could never keep that a secret for this long. There'd be leaks all over the place". I'm continually boggled by that approach. We've been having "leaks" on the topic of crashed disks for many decades. I once spent some time cleaning up Dick Hall's files in his basement [long before he died] and came across an old NICAP file in which were a dozen or so pre-Jesse Marcel leaks sent to NICAP in the 50s and 60s. [Who knows where that file is now, or whether anyone ever followed any of them up? ]Leaks we've got aplenty. What we don't have is an authoritative admission that the leaks are true. One big leak was when an AF investigator told William Fortenberry that a crashed disk had been transported to Wright-Pat some time previous. Any secret that the government has, which engages a relatively small number of operatives, can continue to be held out-of-sight, and produces no public impact, can be "leaked till the mutes-come-home" and all it takes is the authorities to say: "nope, not true" and the secret is in effect kept. Other comments like "why would we be putting all that money into dummo chemical propellents to go to the Moon if we had an alien spacecraft?", are met in my mind with ...DUHHH, because we can't understand how it works? People who don't want to even entertain the possibility of Roswell are, to me, people who for some reason I do not understand, don't want it to be real. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I feel motivated to say what my guess is as to how the debris was handled and who probably was involved. Yeh, I'll admit it, I'm BSing here, but it's not completely uninformed. When Schmitt and Randle did their warrior research job on the crash, they got testimony that some small amount of the metals went [fast] to Washington DC [ArmyAir Force Intel in the Pentagon]. As this makes perfect sense, I see no reason not to go along with the idea as an assumption. If so, this stuff should have been hand-carried over to the National Bureau of Standards where it would have been able to be analyzed [and found to be not like any known terrestrially-made alloy] very quickly. Who would have been in on this? Some people very high up in the Pentagon [maybe Hoyt Vandenberg, maybe his right-hand, George Schulgen, some highly-trusted science advisors, probably Truman, the courier to NBS, the analysts at NBS--even though they probably wouldn't be told upfront what this was, their results would have given them the answer--and, maybe or maybe not the head of the NBS, Edward Condon.]No one else need be told. This includes most, if not all, of the folks pictured in the photos above. Would the whole of the National Security Council be told? I doubt It. Not until a lot more was known about this thing, and whether there were any security consequences within their purview. Would the Research and Development Board be brought in ? Not wholesale--maybe some person of special skill, but perhaps no one at all. Would the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board be brought in? Same thing--no need to know, at least pending further developments. I believe that the problem of figuring out this debris was far beyond our science and these "further developments" never occurred. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This doesn't mean that whoever was controlling this "project" wasn't trying everything they could. Schmitt and Randle have testimony putting the bulk of the crash at Wright-Patterson---specifically at Wright Field. That also makes perfect sense for the time. It was Wright Field [T-3 engineering] who were the boys who worked on actual aircraft and who tried to restore things like crashed German technology from the war. The Wright-Patterson Intelligence community also had no need to know. Did base commander Nathan Twining know? Probably.. but maybe no other office personnel did unless he was blabbing to them. So, what would the crash debris project leaders do? They'd apply their best technology, and hope to find something. When they didn't, they "put-the-stuff-away" until they got news of another technique, and then send out a sample to the techno-wizard who could do the new tests. Have we any information that such things happened? It seems we do. Relatively nearby Wright field is the leading metals development semi-secret [and totally secret if that is what a project required] materials laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle and the government worked on countless "sensitive" projects over the years, even including on UFOs. The famous Blue Book Report #14 was all Battelle's. Accomplished UFO researchers, Bill Jones and Irena Scott, who live in Battelle's backyard [in Columbus, Ohio] have heard the rumors and a few full-fledged stories of how apparent UFO debris was handled by Battelle. Bill's tale is precisely "logical" as to how something would go on. Bill had a best friend whose father was a big wheel at Battelle. He got both of them jobs as a matter of fact. The friend was in a close relationship with a girl whose father also worked at Battelle as a metals tester. That father told them that he was happy because he had just gotten a new project testing some metal parts that [he was told] had come from a Soviet device. They were small I-beams which had writing on them. This went on in the late 50s by the way. Some time later, the man came home half drunk and in a disturbed state of mind. Asked what was wrong, he would only say that the material was no part of any Soviet thing, and could not have been made by anyone on this planet. When Bill was told this story [a few years later], he called the friend's father [the Battelle big-wig] and asked about this. He got only a pleasant denial. But after he hung up, his friend told him that the father went in person to his son's [Bill's friend] residence and read him the riot act about talking ever again about matters such as this, especially to a UFO researcher even if it was Bill. Again, this tale makes perfect sense to me. The crash disk project hears of a new test procedure at Battelle, maybe to analyze orderly metallic crystal structure not possible previously. Battelle heavyweights accept the task, knowing what this is about, but assign the actual testing to the guy who can best do the actual technique--not telling him the truth [i.e. Soviet device]. In this case, the guy is so sharp, and the test good enough that he realizes that they've lied to him, and he's not dealing with anything vaguely normal at all. Even with the "leak" ultimately coming to Bill, the whole thing remains "secret" merely because no authority figure ever says that it's true. Without concrete evidence, nothing changes.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Ubatuba magnesium samples were, of course, an entirely different matter. Unlike Roswell, they were "public", in the hands of the "open" research community. The origins of the case leave something to be desired in terms of solid documentation, and the original witnesses have never been interviewed. Still, people in Brazil like Olavo Fontes felt that the case had good enough bona fides to warrant testing the alleged fallen material. Brazilian testing allegedly found "absolutely pure" magnesium, and the legend of an "unmakeable" [by our hands] piece of metal raced around the UFO community. Fontes sent several of the fragments to Coral Lorenzen at APRO. Two things then happened: metallurgical analysis was done at the University of Arizona by Walter Walker, with significant outside partnership with Robert Johnson. This work looked at the composition of the samples and the details of the crystalline structure. Secondly, the University of Colorado [Condon Project] study wished to test the material. The Lorenzens provided chief case investigator, Roy Craig [a chemist], with some of the material in a spirit of cooperation with what everyone hoped would be a scientific project. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Colorado project began correctly by bringing in the nation's leading experts in magnesium technology, Dow Chemicals of Midland, Michigan. From all the evidence, these guys, led by legendary magnesium expert, R.S.Busk, were good people and were willing to go beyond the minimum requests if anyone wanted them to pursue a particular idea. Everyone in the USA who tested the fragments found them not to be perfectly pure at all, and in fact Dow had many samples far purer. The metal did have some very odd elements mixed in with the magnesium [most unusual being Strontium] but this didn't indicate extraterrestriality as any metallurgical scientist could have created such an alloy. This indicates the difficulty one would have on testing any material substance and claiming that we could not make it [MIT physicist David Pritchard has written a brilliant paper showing the very stringent areas wherein such a conclusion might be possible]. The substance, just as in the evaluation of any true UFO, must have sufficient "strangeness" to make the case. One of the few areas wherein a reasonable case can be made concerns the ratio of isotopes of a given element that an artifact would contain. Earth substances have signature isotope ratios. Finding a significant difference would be pretty convincing that the material had come from "somewhere else". Here again, Colorado began well. Craig and Busk took the magnesium to a federal lab for the difficult isotope ratio analysis. What did they find?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The results are interesting and NOT as the Colorado Project reported. In the photocopied pages to the left, I have high-lighted certain things. [hope you can read them when you click on them--best I could do with these original documents]. In the top two pages Craig notes that the isotope ratio of the Ubatuba magnesium is 14.37% magnesium-26 to magnesium-27 abundance, whereas "Earth" magnesium's ratio is 11.2%. Craig even recalculates the lab's numbers [on the hand-written document] and finds them accurate, and adds that an error-bar [the known accuracy of the tests involved] is only +/- 0.7% and due to some statistical counting problems. The 14.37, even minus the 0.7, still has significant "separation" from the Earth standard so that one should take some notice. Craig and the Colorado Project did not---note the language he tosses to the Lorenzens in the letter illustrated. At best Craig was confused about this. At worst, he simply lied [remember, Roy Craig was a very intelligent man]. Why would he and Condon lie? I believe that it is because they think that UFOs are a priori bunk, this reading doesn't really prove anything, and reporting it [the actual numbers found are never stated either to the Lorenzens nor in the official report] would only agitate the gullible public and the wild UFOlogists. This is not the only instance wherein the project deliberately did bad science and incomplete reporting. All in the name of not rattling you and I, and, one supposes, Roy Craig's prejudices. [he by the way seems to be of those puzzling fellows who is actually quite nice as a person, but weirdly closed down on certain topics]. Later the outstanding Solar Plasma physicist, Peter Sturrock [in the spirit of full disclosure, a friend], did several runs at isotopic ratio determination, and found a clear separation of Ubatuban and Earth-normal distribution. This reading gives stronger meaning to Walter Walker and Robert Johnson's findings that the way this material was crystallized was extremely unusual, and not like metal samples that they were familiar with in normal metallurgy of this element. So...have we ever had a piece of a flying disk? It's up to each of us to answer that, knowing what we can. It's still has to be a bit "gray" for me, but I think Yes.

29 comments:

Once again a great post. Like most topics involving this phenomenon one has to draw conclusions based on imperfect, incomplete or poorly reported data. I always appreciate hearing from others who have taken the time to reflect on this. Thanks.

1) Re: Roswell samples. It would be interesting if the rumors/leaks regarding the samples could be plotted on a calendar to see if they loosely correlate with either graduating college classes (perhaps there's an analysis attempt every X number of years involving new people moving into scientific fields?) OR correlate with scientific achievements in certain fields. Given the nature of the leaks I'm pretty sure this would be a loose correlation *at best* but still might reveal a pattern. I'm thinking along the lines of 'What might have led to the attempted recruiting of Sarbacher, and who else would have met this criteria?'

2) re: Ubatuba. Didn't Vallee have some concerns about the chain of evidence regarding these samples *after* Fontes had initially presented them?

To MnDoc--thank you.----To Steve M: point one..it would be interesting if we had a good set of several [not leaks but] times when someone was called on to do a test. Then we'd need a historian of technology to correlate the first appearances of new testing technologies. If there was a relationship, we could surmise what sort of things "they" were hoping to uncover from the debris; point two...I don't know that he did. He came to a conclusion that the event didn't happen anywhere near [in time] that other people think it did. That idea does not resonate with me, but the important thing is about the isotope ratios and not primarily about the date.

I agree with you in that I don't think whoever has control over the debris has the slightest idea of how it works. I imagine that the investigators are looking primarily in the area of physics and chemistry rather than straight-up aerospace engineering. If, that is, the debris exists...there's still that tiny nagging doubt in my head.

Vallee mentioned Ubatuba in a paper he wrote for the JSE in '98; in the same paper he stated that the Council Bluffs case met all the standards of the chain of evidence but that Ubatuba was 'intriguing'. Combine that with statements in his earlier books concerning preserving chains of evidence and the way Fontes obtained the samples (from somebody [Barbosa?] who received them from a witness; or was Barbosa a witness to the event?) and I can see where I might be misremembering things (I freely admit to not being extraordinarily bright) regarding Vallee and the case.

Excellent point about the leaks...plenty of leaks, just no official confirmation. The difficult part is trying to figure out what leaks are trustworthy. Even if some of the leaks were just disinformation, you'd have to wonder what it is they are really trying to hide if they went to the trouble to 'leak' disinformation as fantastic as some of the stories we've heard.

As for the material that a flying disk or any other type of craft might be made of, I don't know if we should be too concerned with what it is made of. It's still a good idea to analyze it, but the results may or may not be all that important. If the material appears to be something not known to be native to earth, great...cool find. But even if it is similar or even identical to an earth element, that doesn't necessarily have to indicate it was made on earth. If aliens came from another earthlike planet that also had life, would it not be possible that there are also earthlike elements on that planet? Additionally, if the aliens had been visiting earth for a long time, who's to say they hadn't used some earth elements to build a craft?

Ok, but the way you're posing the question doesn't allow of any resolution of any kind [it is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what the Ubatuba argument is trying to accomplish]--that's why people like Pritchard are correct to look for something with high strangeness--low strangeness can always be debunked and that does us no good. The STRANGE isotope ratio is what we want--or the Strange Crystalline structure [ex. nanolayered tech before we could do that]. We're battling the establishment in a most lop-sided field of play here. We have to be able to present things of such clearly high strangeness that it shuts them up long enough for us to get them to listen. If we DON'T care what they think and are happy with just quietly pursuing our hobbies as cultural outsiders, then it makes no difference, and sure it is very possible that Aliens could do anything [practically] that they want. Finding NORMAL materials doesn't debunk our UFOs but it doesn't help us any either. That's why for me it is interesting to find things that they can do BUT WE CAN'T. Only then can I claim that my researches are about non-mundane matters. Even to myself, actually.

One credible report that should be mentioned is that of June Crain, a senior typist at Wright Field with a Q clearance and charge of document safes. Detective Sgt. James E. Clarkson interviewed her in 1997 about what she witnessed at Wright in 1951-2. The transcript runs to nearly 60 pages plus several pages of supporting material. To my mind it is the most credible testimony to the recovery of alien craft that has been made public.

The complete transcript is at:http://www.majesticdocuments.com/pdf/crain_clarksoninterview.pdf

It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are two highlights:

A second-hand account from a noncom who said he transported bodies from a crash in New Mexico in 1951 or 1952 is on p.13:"He called them little green men. He described them as a greenish-blue. And they were four (4) feet tall and they were dead."

A first-hand account of a piece of material from the crash is on p.17:[an officer hands June a curved, thick piece of metallic gray material about the size of a business card] — And he says “ June, you’re good. Tearthat thing apart, break that up.” And I took it and I bent it and I twisted itand I laid it back down, and it went (sound) got right back to the sameshape. I got back to my desk and he said, “cut it. Cut it. Try cutting it.” Igot on my desk. I got my scissors out and I snipped at it, and you knowthere was no way I could cut even cut that piece of metal. And it was aslight as a feather. I had it in my hand and I couldn’t...I would say that itdidn’t weight as much as these two (2) cards-----it wasn’t that heavy. Itwas so light but strong, and it was about the thickness would be about say,let’s see, there, no it would be about, it would be about that thickJim: So it’s fairly thick but doesn’t weigh anything?Int: But it had no weight at all, it was like a feather. And so strong it was sort ofa grayish, gun metal type of color, and you could see that on the inside thatthere was a different that there was coating on the outside of it. Both sideswere the same and the insides seemed to have a sort of a lead colored,light lead colored center to it.

It's an interesting piece of testimony. It's just that for me I haven't the "closeness" to that claim that I have to the material that I've mentioned, so I "found" my hypotheses on that which I feel I know best and use the other stuff as possible supporting data. What I like about Bill Jones' story is that it came out [to his buddy] before all the Marcel testimony et al. This gives it a kind of "purity" that not much else has. It also has no off-note details in it which "clang" with the bulk of the stories. As an aside, "blue-green men" is an outlier description in this business and I doubt it. So is 1951/1952. I would not be surprised that she had a real debris piece shown her once, as she describes, and the black-box controllers learned of it, were unhappy, and fed her some misinformation to make any loose-lips talk less believable in the future.

If we ever did have possession of part or all of a disk chances are that we will never conclusively know. There are hundreds, even thousands of rumors and urban legend that can never be confirmed without the consent of the powers that be. It is the perfect scenario for them if indeed it were true. The resulting rumor and innendo provide perfect cover for any real incident.

Since they dont mind killing or 'disappearing' credible witnesses who go public with inconvenient information, and they have black budgets for intelligence and internal security of in excess of $100,000,000,000 (One Hundred Billion Dollars) each year to contain the mess, there is very little surprising in the lack of alien hardware floating around among the general public.

Moreover, our own state of metallurgy, ceramic and polymer engineering and materials science generally is such that there is no assurance that ET starships need necessarily to be made of anything we couldnt manufacture here. Our lack of a vibrant space program is not the result of materials deficiencies or the need for new alloys we havent figured out how to make yet, its entirely a political deficiency. Recognizing this, there could be more unrecognized UFO debris floating around than we realize.

Finally, since the Isotopic Ratios are nearly the only conclusive proof of the extraterrestrial origin of metal fragments, the extracted implants removed from patients by Dr. Roger Lier should be considered definitive evidence in support of the ETH. They carry perfected chains of custody from surgery to spectrograph, depart as substantially from terrestrial ore as do meteorites, and were inserted during fouth-kind alien encounters. That they also exhibit nanotechnology beyond our capabilities in molecular scale microwave transmission circuitry is just icing on the cake...

Photo leak? Equally mysterious to me is why people come out is "one's", all by themselves. Where are the joint statements of 2, 3 , 4 or more joint witnesses? It's like all these "whistleblowers" worked alone in a vacuum.

Professor: You make a sound case for the importance of serious analysis of purported UFO fragments. Has anyone ever attempted to create an inventory of alleged UFO artifacts? There are probably a hundred or more such specimens in the literature. It is hard to imagine a rigorous assessment of any collection of evidence taking place without a catalog of that evidence.

Looking for any recovered materials having a high strangeness factor (ie. not naturally occurring on Earth and was probably not produced from any known man-made source) or even a leaked genuine photograph of a crashed disk sitting in a military hangar is nice if there is a chance it might be of extraterrestrial origin and there is an open-minded scientific body willing to look at it and can get the materials early enough and directly from the source (ie. the witnesses). Unfortunately that’s a difficult ask.

No doubt the US military aren’t making it easy for everyone.

But what if it is not necessary for a material to have a high strangeness factor in order for an unseen technology hidden in the UFO reports to work? What if a technology does exist in the UFO reports and it turns out to be simpler than we thought and ordinary materials could be used to build it (or at least show a prototype of how it works)? Then we could be barking up the wrong tree looking for materials with a high strangeness factor when in fact any reasonable aerospace material would do.

Even if unusual manufacturing techniques and combinations of known elements within the periodic table (which happens to be available throughout the Universe) were used, it would almost certainly be for enhancing to the extreme certain aerospace engineering properties of the materials. For example the creators would probably want to achieve extreme lightweight properties in the material (much less energy needed to move the bloody thing to high speeds, and therefore likely to use elements in the low end of the periodic table) that is strong (either extremely hard, or having some flexibility in the sense that it can return to its original shape quickly and easily) to help withstand the application of potentially extreme forces on the material, as well as to withstand extreme temperatures (it gets very cold and very hot in space) and corrosion resistance (lots of nasty chemicals in space).

Not surprisingly these are the same engineering properties being sought after by NASA and the European Space Agency. Clearly nothing extraterrestrial about this idea.

This brings us to another problem: the issue of time. You see, as time passes, any unusual material having a high strangeness factor will eventually be figured out by humans on how to produce it and then a US military group involved in the cover up could claim they have produced the material in secret many years ago. Then how would we know the US military doesn’t have extraterrestrial materials recovered and that the material really is strange enough to have an extraterrestrial origin?

Unfortunately as time passes, people soon discover ways to achieve the manufacturing and the strangeness factor is no longer there.

This means we have to go the next level. Is there any unusual technology hidden in the UFO reports not seen or built by scientists? Is there an area of physics that will explain the technology and the observations?

If so, it could help to explain which materials recovered could be genuine extraterrestrial artefacts , and which ones are fakes.

For a clue, it may interest readers to know something has been uncovered in the UFO reports by researchers in Australia via the following web link:http://www.sunrisepage.com/ufo/ufo.htm

So as time passes, any material will eventually be seen as having no strangeness factor. But any unusual technology in the UFO reports not built by the scientists would automatically be rated the highest strangeness factor in the history of science and that would open the door to closer scrutiny of the reports for more evidence of extraterrestrial activity.

Not even time and the ingenuity of humans have the power to dent the strangeness factor of any unseen technology in the UFO reports.

IMO a lot of this Global Warming-Cooling controversy may be explained iff the so-called "Alien Autopsy" was an autopsy notsomuch of an non-Earth Space Alien per se, but an autopsy of a TIME-TRAVELING, ALIEN-LOOKING HUMAN FROM EARTH'S FAR FUTURE whom accidentally crashed while visiting "Old Earth", so to speak. The subject of the autopsy appears "alien" to us humans existing back in the 20th century, but is actually a "normal" human from the future time or era it came from.

QUESTION FOR US GOVT. AND EXPERTS > what would cause a 2Oth Century-or-beyond, anatomically correct Modern Human or Post-Modern Human to evolve naturally into an alien-looking animus form, AND "WHEN"!?

I am in West Virginia visiting my mother for christmas and another week after, as readers of this blog should know. I cannot therefore answer all these comments with only occasionally available and strange technology [for instance this computer just dumped everything I just wrote into a black hole]. I can only say that I do not agree with many of the things in these recent posts, and particularly any of those smacking of certain types of conspiracies. Also, please don't deal with this particular blog like a chat room for every sort of thought not closely related to the topic of the blog entry. I am trying to maintain some sort of order or boundaries on this thing or I will not be able to serve the questions and curiosities of the people who are interested in the topics as presented---I'm only one guy and can't deal with every thought that comes up. When I return home in another week and a half, I'll try to give responsible and evidence-based comments on the more credible comments but forgive me for wanting to spend my vacation mainly with my 93 year old mother. Have a wonderful and spiritual holiday folks and please wish the same for me and my family.

I'll respond to one of the "anonymous's" by saying that the problem of creating a list of alleged alien artifacts is complicated by the fact that so many are obviously and immediately seeable as garbage. Any such list which was vetted by a good UFO researcher would be very short. One of the few artifact claimants that was not mentioned but which would be worth a good look was a piece of milled silicon carbide found in the early 50s in Scandinavia. As far as alleged "implants" are concerned, I cannot be impressed with any of Leir's claims until I see solid science documentation of something genuinely strange about them. One implant researched by a real scientist at the University of Michigan did show an unusual layering effect involving rare elements which could point to advanced production methods used in its formation--this is the only alleged implant that I've seen that has been researched by a responsible scientist using understood techniques which has shown anything remotely like unusual structure. As far as "Art's Parts" are concerned: why doesn't the inquirer ask Bell himself? I shouldn't have to function as a universal fetch boy--do the work yourself--you'll enjoy the adventure more that way anyway.

What are your thoughts on the emerging electromagnetic technology based on the Abraham-Lorentz formula and the patented Thomas Brown's moving capacitor devices coming out of the UFO reports whicj will explain a number of observations and revealed at http://www.sunrisepage.com/ufo.htm? How much of a strangeness factor would this suggest to you as a scientist looking at this for the first time?

Assuming a prototype is built around this technology, would you have anything to say that might make you feel skeptical of the technology?

I'm no physicist. The question would be better addressed to Hal Puthoff or Bernie Haisch. One thing that I try not to do is bluff answers when I have not earned the right to an opinion. So, sorry. I am all for breakthroughs that would lead to Earth-science technology advances but even if we got them it wouldn't prove that this is how the UFOs fly. Still, it would be nice to be able to fly out there and begin a dialogue. My feeling is that the pursuit of a "technological feasibility" argument for UFOs is OK, but not really necessary. I find it very easy to take on faith that techno-advance will be up to interstellar travel and much else given the time that I think it has had on other worlds.

Your focus appears to be on finding fragments with unusual isotopic ratios or strange crystalline structures which could be construed as coming from an artificial extraterrestrial source. From your experience, have you found any fragments that you can definitively state as being sufficiently unusual to warrant further scientific study?

If there was once such a fragment but can be considered reproducible by science today, is there any point waiting for more fragments to come in another potential and unusual wreckage site when other areas of scientific study can resolve the issue once and for all?

We also note that the Roswell metallic foil of July 1947 possessed a shape memory response according to firthand witnesses. Our studies indicate USAF were studying shape memory alloys prior to 1949 including nitinol (NiTi), the world's lightest titanium-based and most powerful shape memory alloy known to science. They have never mentioned it in their report on the Roswell case. It is dark-greyish just like the Roswell metallic foil (i.e "dirty stainless steel" colour) and can withstand heat from a blow torch and blows from a sledgehammer when the metal is hardened by continual cold-working of the alloy. It is also corrosion resistant. Considering that NASA and the European Space Agency are interested in aerospace materials that are extremely lightweight, strong and corrosion resistant, how would you know a material that wasn't reproducible in 1947 to the purity required to show shape memory effects using any technology at the time (and in the quantity seen) but may now be reproduced, may not actually be an example of alien material?

The post answers most of this, in my opinion. Plus, this is hardly my "focus". Other posts indicate the scope of my interest. Posts are topical. Nitinol does not have the easy fold-up property of the Roswell metal description, plus the level of research on it was minimal to zero in 1947 to my understanding of the history of the technology.

In fact, nitinol can fold-up very easily like the roswell metallic foil, is fark greyish (ie. "dirty stainless steel") and can activate the shape memory response at room temperature or below. And the minimal research on nitinol in 1947 is almost true except a Dr John P. Nielsen came out of Wright-Patterson AFB to NYU to study NiTi in the "summer of 1947". Plus we know there is a strong interest in NiTi and other shape memory alloys by USAF at Wright-Patterson AFB and Battelle through several metal journals. Would you care to look at them (even if it is not your expertise)?

To anonymous: you are obviously very interested in this issue. Why don't you write your findings up, publish them somewhere [MUFON would surely do so, and CUFOS would at least look at the article open-mindedly], and then tell the rest of us where we can read it? I can't do everything. And I especially don't want to wade into something that is not my field. You need to take the responsibility for this yourself and make your contribution.

Personally i believe that what happened in roswell is exaggerated to the point that its now difficult to see which is which. The amount of mythmaking and fantasist and huckster peddling the roswell case is really dilluting the real research done on roswell. So far based on what i read , my personal opinion is that there is something that crashed in roswell but it probably a man-made stuff and not extra terrestrial stuff. There are sooo much attention hanging on single crash case on roswell that should be distributed to look for other crashed UFO cases in different location/countries.

as for schimtt and randle , didnt someone found out that he lies on his background/occupation and breaks up with randle after his lies found out ? ( http://www.ufomind.com/area51/list/1997/nov/a04-003.shtml ). You seem to be fond of both people so sorry if i bring this up, but if he lies on small things like that, wouldnt that will cloud his book/research result ?

1). everyone is entitled to their opinion on all of these anomaly situations. What one always hopes for is strong SELF analysis of one's opinion to judge how strongly oneself should not only hold onto it, but argue it. Roswell is a complexity and not easy to honestly get to the point of having strong opinions. BUT, because of the "memory metal" testimonies [which are several] and my small forays into the history of our materials research aiming towards such a alloy, my soft conclusion has been that WE DID NOT HAVE SUCH A MATERIAL. So I am stuck with a real dilemma. I can't with any intellectual honesty say that though there is no sign that we were anywhere close to a memory metal, we had it anyway. But if we DIDN'T have it, BUT THERE IT WAS, how do I explain that? Not by saying human-made technology crashed containing a substance that we didn't possess. This is why there is an enigma.

2). Kevin Randle never lied about anything. So even if you believe that Don lied, there is no justification for doubting Kevin's research. That is the most astonishingly illogical mythology which the Roswell debunkers have continuously broadcast, and their agenda is obvious. Trying to first smear Don and smear that over to Kevin relieves them of the intellectual duty to actually address the case. Pathetic and intellectually dishonest.

Secondly, if one says that Don lied about anything, those things were not relevant to Roswell, the findings there being thoroughly vetted by not only Kevin but also Mark Rodeghier and several others of us who use to sit with both Don and Kevin and go over their work long before anything would be published. Don in fact led the "extraction" of evidence from Frank Kaufmann's study, which proved that he was a hoaxer. Don led the early investigation of another crash witness claim, which proved that the fellow's family forced him to change his story to allow them to engage in a money making scheme [the man's original story was possibly a good piece of data, but they ruined the atmosphere around it, and Don and Kevin did not use it].

Thirdly, Don's "lies" were [and yes I have great affection for him as I know him well and like him] "white lies" at worst. He inflated his studies status saying he was in a grad CJ program, when he was not yet but merely applying for it, and saying that he was a commercial artist, which was true but was not his primary job with the post office. How in the Hell can people be vicious and holier-than-thou enough to jump a guy's case for such matters?? Yet this crap continues to be spread like unstoppable manure. The bottomline is: I know Don Schmitt. He's a great guy. He's an open sharing guy. Other people are welcome to their opinions, but I'd prefer if they'd keep them on the other side of their teeth unless they have good reasons to throw mud at a good man.